On 6/1/07, Joe Szilagyi szilagyi@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/1/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/1/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Why aren't these categories being removed as blatant NPOV violation and incitement to more? Is NPOV up for a vote at CFD or something?
Because it turns out to be very hard to get these things deleted, in practice.
For the list articles themselves, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish-American_politicians
I went one at random: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gruening ...and not one mention of "Jew", "Jewish", or "Judaism" beside the infobox. The two online sources:
http://famousamericans.net/ernestgruening.com/ http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=G000508
Also have nothing indicating his religiion. Why aren't these articles just hammered for BLP concerns? Let alone the general lack of sourcing? Less than half the names have any sources at all. I've seen people scrub lists that were infinitely more trivial for lack of sourcing than BLP-related lists like this...
It's not so easy. In late January someone brought to my attention the [[List of Jewish American businesspeople]], pointing out that an IP editor had, for over a month, been adding dozens of names to the list without any sourcing. When he had removed a bunch of unsourced names, the IP editor simply reverted him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Jewish_American_businesspe...
I then went to the page, and removed the items several times, but the IP editor reverted me several times as well, insisting it was up to *me* to "prove they are not Jews":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Jewish_American_businesspe...
and then went on to add even *more* unsourced names:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Jewish_American_businesspe...
At that point I warned him that if he did this again, I was going to take the article down to a stub, listing only the names that had proper sourcing Of course, he did it again, so I stubbed it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Jewish_American_businesspe...
Of course, he reverted me, with the edit summary "What is this, a dictatorship? Fascistpedia? You should get some arbitration on this -- restoring page."
After the page was semiprotected, the IP editor eventually joined as [[User:Wassermann]], and has been adding literally thousands of "Jew categories" to articles, and ranting and raving ever since about "censorship"; take a look at his User: page to get more information.
Since then I've been working quite hard at insisting that all items on the list be properly sourced, in lieu of deleting it altogether, which would be the preferred course. Currently there are five names on it. Of course, that doesn't stop people from trying to restore the previous unsourced list, and add even more names, e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Jewish_American_businesspe...
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Jewish_American_businesspe...
The latter person, Scifiintel got quite incensed when I stubbed the list again: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jayjg&diff=prev&...
As to motivation? Well, I'll just note that Scifiintel has most recently been trying to add paragraphs about Jews having too much influence in America to the "Jewish lobby" article, based on the work of a Holocaust denial outfit, the Institute for Historical Review - and, of course, he insists that the IHR doesn't deny the Holocaust, it just question certain aspects of it, like whether millions of Jews were killed etc.
So, that's what I'm up against for *one* single article. Now imagine trying to do this on hundreds of them.